15 Reasons Why Your House Hasn’t Sold: The Blueprint to Sell Any House

15 Reasons Why Your House Hasn’t Sold: The Blueprint to Sell Any House

15 Reasons Why Your House Hasn’t Sold: The Blueprint to Sell Any House

If you tried listing your house in the past and were unable to sell it, the latest book by Joshua Inglis is a must read. 15 Reasons Why Your House Hasn’t Sold: The Blueprint to Sell Any House was written for people in your exact situation. Many houses that are listed for sale have a better chance of not selling than they do of actually selling. It is a scary statistic that is not talked about in the real estate industry but is a sobering one.

The truth is that houses should be marketed with the most cutting-edge technology and tools if you want your house to stand out from the thousands of other homes available. If you house does not stand out from the crowd it will be difficult to sell and result in less money for you the seller. The real estate agent you hire should be utilizing the best marketing tools available because your bottom line is ultimately affected if they are not.

A Big Takeaway from 15 Reasons Your House Hasn’t Sold: The Blueprint to Sell Any House

The biggest mistake that real estate agents and sellers make today is pricing. For some reason people believe that they should list homes at odd numbers like $199,999 vs $200,000. The truth is that listing a home at $199,999 results is substantially less exposure to the market place! This is because people do searches online in even increments. Joshua found using market research and reverse prospecting that listing homes at odd numbers result in less buyers, every single time.

Here is a case study from the book:

Let’s do a very basic example of a house where houses are selling between 190k and 200k. We run multiple scenarios and incorporate the houses features to strategically price the house.

What do you think the list price should be? Should you list the house at $210,000 so that way you can negotiate down? Should you be conservative and list the house at $190,000? Should you try to trick the buyer into thinking they are getting a better deal by listing it at $199,000. Or should you list the house at $200,000? Let’s look at the data from reverse prospecting and find out with a real example.

Here are the results:

$190,000 – 1,780 buyers set up on automatic MLS searches

$195,000 – 1,693 buyers set up on automatic MLS searches

$199,000 – 1,682 buyers set up on automatic MLS searches

$200,000 – 1,798 buyers set up on automatic MLS searches

$205,000 – 1,385 buyers set up on automatic MLS searches

$210,000 – 1,369 buyers set up on automatic MLS searches

As you can see, there are the most buyers at $200,000! There are actually fewer buyers at $190,000 even by pricing the house $10,000 cheaper! That’s how underpricing your house can hurt the exposure if you do not look at the data. What’s even more surprising is that there are 116 fewer buyers searching at $199,000 than $200,000! Always look at the numbers because it only takes one person to buy a house. There is a very good chance that the house is a good fit for at least one or two of those 116 buyers.

A house listed at $199,000 may have 2-8% fewer buyers than a house that is listed at $200,000 in a neighborhood. If an agent ever suggests an odd number like $199,000, $199,274, $399,000, 449,000, or $999,990 they have not looked at the data because there are always fewer buyers on odd numbers.

Third Party Sites

What’s even more astounding is the fact that the information above does not even incorporate the numbers from Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, or Redfin websites. Let’s take another example of a house that is listed at $499,999. This house would not be found on online searches if people entered their price criteria to begin at $500,000. This means that your house could be getting astronomically less exposure from the MLS and all third party sites! See pictures below as examples.